Striped Glove Video

 I have finally finished the video on how I sew gloves! I started working on this well over a month ago.

It started out just being about the striped pair, but then I was worried the stripes would make the sewing hard to see, so I also made a plain pair with larger cuffs.

As is usually the case when I make a video, I was so busy filming that I forgot to take progress photos. (I'll probably come back and edit this blog post to have more pictures and links, I just really want to get the video posted tonight now that it's finally finished.)

I also haven't got very good pictures of me wearing them yet, so I'll try to get some later.

I'm so happy with my wee little dragons.

The striped ones are of course inspired by the extant printed striped pair from the MFA collection. (The same gloves that inspired my disastrous first pair 5 years ago.) 

I didn't want to paint people on mine, so I did dragons.
Here's a link to my historical (largely but not entirely 18th century) dragon pinterest board, and another to my glove pinterest board.

French, late 18th century, MFA Boston.

The second, plainer pair is based mainly on the Diderot patterns from 1768, but I have seen similar cuff shapes a lot earlier.

I took the first photo, wore them out and about a few times, and then remembered I hadn't taken any other photos, which is why they're dirtier and more hand shaped in these ones.

And here are the finger measurement diagrams I said I'd post here in the pattern drafting part of the video.

I'd like to come back and edit this post so it's more informative and less disjointed, but for now I hope this will suffice! It's close to midnight and I work tomorrow, and I just need to line up the subtitles before my video is all done. 

Any images in the video that aren't linked here should be in either of the two linked pinterest boards, and the supplies are linked in the video description.

Black suede gloves

My goodness, I've fallen behind on blogging again! The blogger format has changed and I do not like it, but I won't get any better at navigating it by avoiding posting.

I started these gloves sometime last year, and then left them half finished in a box for many months, as I so often do. But then this year took them out again and finished them.

They're mostly the same pattern as my first pair, just with the thumb hole adjusted slightly.

I cut them from an old black suede skirt, which has proven tougher than the crappy jacket leather I made my first pair from, but still not ideal as it doesn't have as much stretch as a glove ought to. 

Just like the previous pair, I hand sewed it all with a whipstitch using waxed linen thread.

I cut them out with a teeny tiny bit more seam allowance than before, and it made the fingers much looser, which I don't like. It turns out even a millimetre of seam allowance makes a HUGE difference on glove fingers, which are pretty small, and having any extra width on the 6 or 8 pattern piece edges around them really adds up.

Next time I'll go back to cutting the pattern with no seam allowance.

They're not perfect, but they fit and are comfortable! I've been wearing them regularly now that it's autumn.

You can tell by the daisies that I finished these over a month before actually bothering to post them...

Striped Gloves

Or

A Study in Regrettable Material Choice

________________________

Here they are, my last project of 2018. Sometime in the year I saw this picture on pinterest and was utterly delighted by the idea of striped gloves.

Pair of man's gloves. French, Printed leather, late 18th century.

Then I noticed two 18th century fashion plates that also had striped gloves.

Edit: I have since realized that the gloves in these plates are most likely knitted, since the stripes going around the fingers makes much more sense that way, and this extant pair looks incredibly similar. (I still have seen solid green gloves in fashion plates though, which may have been leather.)

Journal de la mode et du goût, 15th November 1790.

Both pairs of fashion plate gloves are green & black, but one has an alternately coloured version that appears to be striped in buff & black. (It's hard to tell with such tiny hands, it could possibly be orange or brown?)

Journal de la mode et du goût, 25th October 1790.

Source.

 I then decided to make striped gloves for the "Hands and Feet" HSM challenge for September 2018. I made my pattern and did a paint sample but then just didn't make the gloves for some reason.

Since December's theme was "Neglected Challenge" I did the gloves for that challenge instead.

Both of the fashion plate pairs have stripes running across the width of the hand, and the extant gloves have them lengthwise. I decided to make mine lengthwise in black and green. I also considered adding a medallion with a little picture to the back of the hand, like on the extant pair, but decided to save that for a future pair of gloves. I'd do an 18th century dragon on mine instead of a couple of people.

I had a few single leather gloves that I've found on the ground over the years, so I cut one up to get the basic size of my pattern. I cut the fingertips off and taped them further up to get the right length, but other than that the glove mostly fit me.

I traced all the bits, but they were very wonky so I had to straighten them out a lot. They also aren't shaped like 18th century glove pattern pieces, so I changed some things to make them look more like the glove patterns from Diderot's Encyclopédie. Those patterns are from the 1760's, but as far as I can tell the cut of gloves stayed pretty much the same for a very very long time, so they are just fine for 1790.

I did two mockups in leather from an old coat, but I think I still need to adjust the pattern a bit. I tapered the fingertips just a bit too much. I also need to tweak the shape of the thumb slightly.

My final pattern.

And here is where the regrettable material choice comes in! Oh what a fool I was! I should have ordered leather paint, but I did not.
I used my fabric printing ink, and leather is NOT the same as fabric.
I did a couple of samples and discovered that even though it was heat set the ink wore off very easily, but I was somehow not put off by this. I grabbed a bottle of water based varnish off my shelf and painted it over my sample, and it looked okay. I agitated the sample a bit, and ran water over it, and it seemed to hold?
Satisfied with my terrible choice of materials, I foolishly pressed on.

My sample, including a dinosaur to practice for the dragons I didn't add.

I traced my glove pattern out on the back portion of an old leather jacket. I masked the stripes with the narrowest tape I could find in the craft store. (Which happened to be 3mm washi tape that came in packs with several other wider rolls of tape, so I'm going to have to start putting fancy tape in my sketchbooks.)

With all my tape laid down, I painted the green ink over all the pattern areas.

I peeled off the tape, let the ink dry, and heat set it. I put a couple coats of the varnish on.

I cut the pieces out and sewed them all together with a whipstitch, which is left on the outside of the gloves.

Can't pin leather because it leaves permanent holes, so I used paperclips where necessary.

They sewed up pretty quickly, and I thought they looked pretty good, though the varnish made them much too shiny for historical gloves.
When I tried them on I found them stiff and a bit too tight, especially in the fingers. I had cut out my mockup with a couple millimeters of seam allowance, but cut out my gloves with a bit less, and millimeters make a huge difference with gloves.

I figured they'd be fine if I just stretched them out a bit, so I sprayed a tiny bit of water on the inside and wore them for a bit.

They stretched out very well, but the stretching caused the varnish to flake and peel off in a few places. It doesn't really show up in these photos, but there are now quite a few sections where the black stripes look more grey because the varnish has lifted up but not come off entirely. The coat leather is also not as strong as I expected, I've only worn these a few times and there's a bit of splitting happening between two of the fingers, and a small tear happened on the left glove when I pulled it on for these photos.

You can see the tear in the cuff of the glove I'm holding.

So they're pretty bad in terms of materials, and they definitely won't wear well, but at least they look good for a first pair.

What the item is: A pair of man's gloves
What passed challenge are you recreating: September: Hands and Feet
Material: black leather from an old jacket
Pattern: my own, based on the Diderot ones
Year: c. 1790
Notions: Linen thread, fabric ink
How historically accurate is it? Ehh, maybe 60%? The pattern and construction are fine, but the materials were Bad. And they never would have printed green stripes on black leather, it makes so much more sense to print the darker colour on top of the lighter one. (except the linen thread, it's fine)

Hours to complete: 13, not including patterning
First worn: January 1st 2019, but at 2 am so it's only a wee bit late!
Total cost: The only thing I bought was the tape, and I forget how much it was. Not very many dollars. The jacket I got from a clothing swap, and the ink and thread I already had.

Overall I guess... they're not.... too terrible? They're not suited to lots of wear but they'd be fine to use occasionally for photos. And in any case, they were a learning experience.

I want to make more gloves! I have ordered some fine goat skin, but before I cut into that I will make a second pair with suede from an old skirt I have. And from now on I will only paint on leather with products specifically made for leather.

I definitely made the thumb hole too big. Will fix that next time!

There, 2018 projects all blogged! Now I can do my year-in-review post.

Update: The cuff area of one of them is now badly torn, so I guess the old jacket leather was also a bad material choice. These are now officially only useful as props. Which will work okay, because you see a lot of men in portraits wearing only one glove and holding the other. Oh well.
I'll make a better pair of striped gloves eventually, with proper leather dye!